A Quote
‘When kids work hard at something they love and find challenging, they enter a state of what’s come to be called “flow”, where time passes quickly and their attention is completely engaged, but they’re not stressed. When you’re in flow, levels of certain neurochemicals in your brain - including dopamine - spike. These neurochemicals are like performance-enhacing drugs for the brain. You think better in flow, and you process information faster.
…
So when you see an eight-year-old highly focused on building a Lego castle, lips pressed in concentration, what she is actually doing is getting her brain used to being motivated. She is conditioning her brain to associate intense enjoyment with highly focused attention, practice, and hard work.’
Source: Stixrud and Johnson, The Self-Driven Child, p.113-114
A Thought
Adults in and around schools often ask for evidence that play ‘works’.
My response has been to rely on evidence of achievement, assuming that if the adults see that kids can learn through play and get good results, then that will convince them.
Now, I’m not so sure.
What I think now is that this is actually a values question.
At a social level, play is looked down upon because what it’s associated with - excitement, joy, a receptiveness to opportunity - is not valued as highly as the way we believe symbols of achievement and excellence (high grades, worthy degrees, important jobs, big salaries) are attained - seriousness, hard work, a goal-focused mindset.
Parents look to schools to enable and support the pursuit of those symbols and worry about things like reading levels, how their kid is performing in relation to the other kids, and whether their kid is keeping up. Accordingly, we have an education narrative that emphasises excellence1, acceleration, and progress, orientated around an approach that emphasises seriousness, hard work, and goals.
There is no doubt that we rely on coercion and control to get kids to take their education seriously, put in the hard yards, and achieve their goals. And you know what, it works, really well (mostly). The results that are valued tell us that.
No one really cares if they’re bored, unexcited …
But I haven’t signed up for that as a parent. I want my kids to be excited about life, find joy in what they do, and be open to the world and all its possibilities. I want them to be self-motivated, with initiative and willingness in spades.
If these are the things I value, then it’s flow I need them to be experiencing as much as possible because that’s what grows those qualities.
It’s in play that flow is most likely to occur.
Trouble is, we can’t control play, nor coerce people into a state of flow. All we can do is put the right conditions in place and trust it will happen.
An Action
Look at gathering different data so that you can start to challenge values.
An example. Recently I challenged a play-based school I was working with about their literacy data. While it told them how well the kids could read, it told them nothing about how many wanted to. Given we know that it’s a willingness to read that actually matters over the long term, and they were seeing many kids pick up books and read independently in their play, this was a real gap in their data.
My challenge to them: gather, analyse, and act on data about willingness as well as ability.2
This is the topic of November’s Deep Dive essay. Subscribers on the free plan have access to the first third of it, paid subscribers have full access.